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The book represents three decades of learning and exploration on the part of author Mary Siisip Geniuz, who was a teaching assistant to the late Keewaydinoquay, an Anishinaabe/Ojibwe medicine woman. Keewaydinoquay, a teacher and ethnobotanist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, charged Geniusz with the responsibility of passing on her knowledge to another generation.

“Now, at the time of this writing, Keewaydinoquay is gone on the four-day journey to the Other Side, my children are grown, and I am rapidly aging,” Geniusz writes. “I face the same quandary that mymashkikiiwikwe,medicine woman, faced: how to manage not to die until I have transmitted the knowledge that she gave me, that she held from Nodjimiahkwe and the ancestral teachers down the ages.”